Bangladesh has faced a challenging period recently, raising questions about the future of political stability in the country. Naturally, policymakers and analysts are now seeking solutions — one that keeps surfacing is whether more reforms should be undertaken. With the increasing participation of women in political activities, there is a common question: “Can female representation in Parliament help stabilise political conditions?” It requires an answer grounded in evidence.
This past year, we have been exploring this question based on a sample of data from 58 countries from 2011 to 2024, by examining the trajectories of each country’s political stability experience rather than comparing rich and poor democracies, because each country’s past is a better yardstick by which to judge its own experience than another country’s.
The question was straightforward: as the share of women in Parliament goes up, does political stability follow? The practical scenario depicts a different picture from the popular belief regarding female representation in Parliament.
Beginning with the wealthy democracies, there is a bare minimum connection between female representation and political stability, similar to barely more than a handshake between them. A free and independent judiciary, electoral laws laid down long before the current Parliament, and a press free to ask tough questions are crucial to stability in those nations. But the ratio of men to women in the legislature doesn’t necessarily tip the scales.
Shedding light on countries at Bangladesh’s own level of income, in most cases, the more women were in Parliament, the more stability was lost. For the major part of the time, stability slipped rather than held when female representation increased in Parliament.
Why the flip? What we believe is the best explanation is not all that strange. We would know it if we had been through a house remodelling while we were still dwelling in that residence. The dust, noise, and mess do not necessarily mean that the new plan is failing; they are merely reflections of the by-products of construction. This is what we are seeing take place. Political scientists Krook and Clayton had uncovered that reforms that moved towards increased female leadership almost never resulted in a settled system. Instead, they often came as part of a structural regime change, as coalitions split and reformed, quota conflicts brought interruptions and threatened to create rifts, and elite bargains collapsed.
Representation and instability increase simultaneously, but not because of a cause-and-effect relationship; rather, both are downstream consequences of the same ‘churn’. There is also a psychological price to such a transition. For instance, if a woman breaks onto the political scene, it is attributed to luck rather than to merit, and resentment towards her spills over into the figures, masking the actual source of the political instability. Then, where democratic ground has yet to be solidified, all forms of contest become trickier, discouraging candidates in general.
Our own reserved-seat system makes the point without much need for interpretation. Voters do not have any direct role in deciding the fifty reserved seats for women. This is because the seats go to different parties in proportion to how many directly elected seats they already hold. These are seats without a constituency behind them, with occupants often left out of real committee work and dependent entirely on the party that placed them there. In such a transitional period, who gets those seats has itself become a bargaining chip among parties rebuilding coalitions at the very moment of instability. Such situations occur simultaneously, yet without a proper straight-line connection of cause and effect from one to the other.
None of this argues for backing away from gender-inclusive reform. It argues that merely being present in the government does not mean having power or authority. What has proved to be stable across all of the income-group countries we studied is not something loud, like a headcount, but something quieter: whether people can speak without fear, whether courts operate as courts, and whether a nomination is associated with a genuinely contested election. Representation that does not have that underneath it is just a number. This means that if we intend to bring about a significant reduction in instability, there is a need to establish a stable framework for female representatives in Parliament, one that is driven by authority.
Dr. A S M Shakil Haider is an Assistant Professor of Economics at BRAC University.
Dr. Arif Mazumder is an Assistant Professor at BRAC Business School.
[The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the position of The Daily Bonik Barta or the organisations they work for.]